Comments on vested interests' comments on health care

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So apparently Lord Krebs command of the theory and practice of allocating health care resource allocation is such that he confidently concludes…..under the somewhat tainted brand of the UK House of Lords – that the methods for evaluating health technologies must be changed because they are likely to come to the wrong conclusion.

If he adopted this highly subjective approach to the design of his science experiments, one wonders whether his science career would have been quite so successful.

Within a limited health care budget, the fairest assessment of whether a treatment is ‘worthwhile’ considers whether it produces more health for its beneficiaries than it displaces elsewhere. Paying for stem cell therapies takes money away from other therapies, and so displaces other peoples’ health care. So, if paying for the therapy requires that other people give up more than it produces, it is hard to see it as a worthwhile use of the health care budget.

Its the right of special interest groups to lobby parliament for special treatment, but isn’t it the right of the electorate to expect parliament to be slightly better informed and more objective than in this report.